


I Could Drown in You

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Everything Hurts, M/M, Unrequited Love, mostly angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-02-05 03:36:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1803835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean never had any control over him.</p>
<p>Written at the end of season 7.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Could Drown in You

**Author's Note:**

> So I found this in my Trash folder on my Drive and when I read it, I felt like it wasn’t that bad. I haven’t posted anything in awhile either and this was nearly done when I found it. Short, sad, and angsty. Definitely not my best but not bad, eh? 
> 
> Comments are always appreciated, but I don’t expect them for this particular story. Kudos and stuff <3

Things change after Stanford. Well of course they do, his girlfriend is dead and dad is missing. But things change between _us_ which is something I am entirely unprepared for. It’s nothing big, not at first and I’m pretty sure that I’m the only who feels it, but things definitely change. I don’t know, maybe it had always been this way, but I certainly don’t remember ever feeling like this. If I do, they’re incredibly vague memories. All I know is that when he enters the car, I want to make sure he never leaves. It’s rational, though, the intense, burning need to make sure Sam never leaves my sight again. At least, that’s what I tell myself. But he’s not a kid anymore, if the cut of his jaw and length of his legs is anything to go by. Still, I reason that I only want to protect him, to make sure that he never falls into harm’s way ever again.

**  
**

Maybe it’s the touching that changes. We’ve always been an abnormally affectionate pair of brothers. That’s what happens when you grow up in a back seat together. I’ve, admittedly, never had a very clear or defined concept of personal space. Sam and I shared everything, space seemed like a given. But, of course, he grew up. Somewhere in his annoyingly big brain, he gained some sort of understanding of what space was and how to keep it between us.

**  
**

He drew into himself more and more and, eventually, we were like a normal pair of brothers who only shared personal space when strictly necessary. I hate normal. But that’s how it was between us after he hit puberty. Up until the week before he left for Stanford. He was unusually cuddly, then. That should have been my red flag, but I was too busy basking in the glow of a snuggly Sam. Anyways, when he’s back in the front seat after Stanford, I can’t keep my hands off of him and he doesn’t seem to mind.

**  
**

It’s nothing perverted, really. I’m just lost in the reality of Sam being there, just a few inches away from me, all long legs and toned muscles. He’s _there_ and alive and in touching distance. Of course I take advantage of that. It’s impossible to keep my hand off his knee while I’m driving and it’s inevitable that I toy with the hair at the base of his neck whenever I’m feeling generous enough to let him drive. These touches aren’t new and I think that he understands them because he doesn’t back away or smack my hand like he would have when he was fifteen. But, still, something changes. He never reciprocates the touches so maybe that’s it. Maybe the difference is how one-sided our relationship has become since Stanford.

**  
**

I can’t blame him. He lost his girlfriend and obviously needed time to mourn. But the touches (or lack thereof) don’t explain the irrational anger I feel when he meets Sarah. She’s everything Sam needs after the tragedy he’s suffered. I don’t like her. I don’t like the way she looks at Sam or the way he smiles when she flirts with him. Still, I push him at her, because my anger doesn’t make sense. I’m a lot of things, but selfish isn’t one of them. The relief I feel when Sam, being the huge girl that he is, decides not to sleep with her is completely irrelevant. I ignore the pang in my chest that stabs at me when he kisses her goodbye. I grin and wink at Sam when he gets back in the car, but something inside me is on fire.

**  
**

After that, I’m hugely grateful for the fact that my brother is more interested in cases than he is in hook ups. I’m infinitely thankful that whatever gene I got that makes me such an insatiable horndog does not run in his veins with the same intensity. I don’t take time to understand my feelings because I’m Dean Winchester and that is on the top ten list of things I never do. But I can't stop myself from interfering in Sam’s love life from that point on.

**  
**

I don’t know when I notice it. Really, I honestly don’t. I don’t know when I start writing mental poetry about the way the sun highlights his hair or how graceful he is when he moves. Because he is. He’s huge, abnormally so. But he moves with a feline precision that is every bit as fierce as it is beautiful. It definitely isn’t something that hits me all at once. It happens eight steps out in front and my mind takes months to catch up with it. I know because when I finally realize how I see my baby brother, I realize I’ve been seeing it for a long time. It’s like tuning into a game halfway through. The play’s already been set up, bases are loaded and the home team has two outs, and I’ve been watching this whole time and I know what’s going on but it doesn’t really register until the guy at bat hits a grand slam. I saw it happening the entire time, this thing I felt for Sam, but it didn’t really hit me until I was too deep in to pull myself out.  

**  
**

When I realize what, exactly, it is that I’m feeling, it’s much too late to put up a fight with it. That doesn’t mean I don’t try. The realization almost crushes me. It almost has me yelling at Sam for being there, for being so goddamned beautiful, for making me need him. It’s hard after that, to ride in the front seat of the Impala with him. The air is suddenly too thick and the space that had been too much before is no longer enough. The space between us is no longer a barrier, but a safe wall that keeps me from doing something horrible. He doesn’t feel it.

**  
**

But the touches stop because I can’t, _can’t_ control myself when it comes to Sam. He’s always been too much. Not just physically either; metaphorically, he’s always been _too much_. But he was always mine and he was my _too much_ and I had to protect him with my _not enough_. It all worked out when we were younger. He was smaller than me then, physically, and I was able to fool myself into believing that that equivocated to me being bigger than him.

**  
**

But Sam has always been too much and it occurs to me, too late, that I’ve never had any handle on us. Sam was a lake and I didn’t know I was drowning in him until I was floating face down on the surface. By the time my brain catches up, I’m too far gone for things to be different. Unfortunately for me, my brother is Sam Winchester who is a few genes and one Will and Grace marathon short of having a vagina. So he cottons onto the changes much faster than I want him to. He doesn’t push, which is very un-Sam but he keeps his distance and doesn’t ask why. But the sidelong glances and casual questions of how I’m doing are enough to set me on edge.

**  
**

The dynamic is different and I have to wonder if it’s some freaky psychology trick that Sam picks up in college. He, in a very not-him fashion, takes the Winchester high-road and doesn’t ask me a thousand questions about why I’m acting weird; because I know that I am. I know that I’ve started treating the space between us like a physical barrier. I know that I’ve begun to tiptoe around him. I know that I’ve suddenly discovered personal space and understood why Sam so desperately craved it in his adolescence. I know that I’m acting different but, for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to be normal. Suddenly Sam isn’t my little brother anymore, but an object; one that I want so badly, I would kill for it. But I can’t have it; have him.

**  
**

It’s agonizing.

  


*

**  
**

Then I go to hell and things are almost easier when I come back. Almost. I’m still helplessly in love with him, but Alistair fucked me up so badly in the Pit that I can ignore it. I can ignore him. The suffering is almost enough. Almost. On some masochistic moral level, I’m almost thankful for my time in the Pit. I never tell Sam this. He would ask why and that would lead to a conversation that I never intend on having. Instead, I focus on him and Demon blood while trying to rationalize the ugly feeling of absolute jealousy that I feel when I see him with that Ruby skank. It’s easier to put blame on him, to watch him feel guilty. It’s insanely fucked up, but I let him feel guilty in lieu of shining any sort of light on my feelings for him.

**  
**

So maybe I rub it in a little. But I need for him to bear some of this weight, because I’m dying under it. He seems to understand. Either that, or he’s a huge martyr. He accepts my tongue lashings and my verbal beatings. He hangs his head and lowers his eyes and takes it. It drives me crazy. I know I’m poking all of his soft spots. He knows it too. He also knows I don’t meant it...at least, I think he does. Crap, I really hope he does because he needs to understand that the only reason I yell at him is because I’m afraid of what would come out if I said anything else. Some part of me knows that he doesn’t. He thinks I hate him. I guess, in a really backward sort of way, I do.

**  
**

When the amulet hits the bottom of the trash bin, I feel him break. I hate myself so much, but heaven wasn’t at all like it was supposed to be. Rationally, I know Zachariah had a hand in it. He wants to drive Sam and I further away from each other. Still, finding out that he and I are soulmates doesn’t do anything for my predicament. Okay, we’re not soulmates. We’re two halves of a whole, forever intertwined. But it almost makes being in love him feel like it might be an okay thing. Which is totally  not an okay thing. He thinks I’ve lost my faith in him. Truthfully, I’ve lost faith in myself. I want to tell him, then. I want to spill my heart onto the floor in front of him. I don’t, though. I let him stew in it.

**  
**

Cas figures it out long before I’ve said it aloud; even just to myself. He doesn’t say anything right away. But then Sam starts talking about saying yes and I go outside to get some air because this has all gotten way out of hand and I wonder when that happened. Then I realize that this has always been happening. He is a lake and I’m still drowning in him; I’ve never had any hand on this at all. This was always out of my control; he’s always been out of my control.

**  
**

“It is not really a sin, you know,” is what Cas decides to open up with that night. “Not for you two.”

**  
**

“Yeah?” I say gruffly, smirking at the angel bitterly. “What makes us so special?”

**  
**

“Wherever he goes, you go. No matter what. Your souls are intertwined and heaven wants you, Dean. But they cannot have you without Sam.”

**  
**

“So what? You’re saying I should just go for it, that there won’t be an consequences?”

**  
**

“Only the ones you come up with for yourself.”

**  
**

I hate that answer but I don’t say anything. I go back inside where Sam is asleep and I beg silently for the world not take him away from me; not again. The outcome of this war is looking more and more bleak. I know that I have to say goodbye. But I don’t, not then. I let him sleep because I love him too much to wake him with goodbyes. We still have tomorrow, after all.

**  
**

*

**  
**

When I kiss him, there’s tears on my face and blood on his lips and I’m shaking. I’m shaking because I feel like I’ve only just got him and he’s going away again. I’m shaking because this thing’s been building up under my skin and I’m on fire. I wonder if he can feel it, the heat that burns at 3000 degrees in my heart just for him, up there where the air is always so cold. He’s walking to his death and I can’t let him go. I don’t know how my lips reach his, but they do. He doesn’t kiss back. He’s stiff as a board, his eyes alight with power. He doesn’t kiss back. He pulls back and I watch the emotions play over his face, he looks at me and I know my face must be a wreck right now. Understanding dawns on those beautiful features and my stomach drops.

**  
**

“Dean,” he says softly.

**  
**

“Sam?” The question’s been asked. I can tell he understands, his lips curl into a small frown and he shakes his head in the negative. I can tell he wants this not to hurt.

**  
**

“Okay,” I whisper, backing away from him, “okay.”  


  


My heart is somewhere near my shoes and there are tears behind my eyes; but they never fall. I give him one last look and he smiles, a bigger one this time. He walks off, walks to his grave and I want to call him back but I don’t.

**  
**

I want him to love me back, but he doesn’t.

**  
**

“I’m in love with you,” I whisper into the nothingness, saying it for the first time ever.

**  
**

“I love you.”

****  
  
  



End file.
